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34-558: It was intended to provide high resolution (at the time) monochrome graphic abilities to computers limited to text displays . It was aimed at the business market and one of the three first third party graphic boards for PCs (the others being Plantronics Colorplus and Hercules Graphics Card ). It offered a monochrome 720 × 350 pixel resolution (similar to Hercules Graphics Card) and required an existing MDA board to function. The board also offered an IBM PC joystick adapter . No software, other than GSX-86 and that supplied with

68-501: A modified version of the character set box-drawing characters were added in reserved areas of their normal HP Roman-8 character set. On many Unix systems and early dial-up bulletin board systems the only common standard for box-drawing characters was the VT100 alternate character set (see also: DEC Special Graphics ). The escape sequence Esc ( 0 switched the codes for lower-case ASCII letters to draw this set, and

102-592: A DOS influence in many TUIs. The program minicom , for example, is modeled after the popular DOS program Telix . Some other TUI programs, such as the Twin desktop, were ported over. Most Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) support virtual consoles , typically accessed through a Ctrl-Alt-F key combination. For example, under Linux up to 64 consoles may be accessed (12 via function keys), each displaying in full-screen text mode. The free software program GNU Screen provides for managing multiple sessions inside

136-596: A lightweight terminal multiplexer. VAX/VMS (later known as OpenVMS ) had a similar facility to curses known as the Screen Management facility or SMG. This could be invoked from the command line or called from programs using the SMG$ library. Another kind of TUI is the primary interface of the Oberon operating system , first released in 1988 and still maintained. Unlike most other text-based user interfaces, Oberon does not use

170-551: A native interface for command-line interface and TUI programs. The console usually opens in window mode, but it can be switched to full, true text mode screen and vice versa by pressing the Alt and Enter keys together. Full-screen mode is not available in Windows Vista and later, but may be used with some workarounds. Windows Terminal is a multi-tabbed terminal emulator that Microsoft has developed for Windows 10 and later as

204-492: A quick reference for these symbols on systems that are unable to display them directly: In version 16.0 (September 2024), Unicode was extended with another block containing many graphics characters, Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement , which includes a few box-drawing characters and other symbols used by obsolete operating systems (mostly from the 1970s and 1980s). Various different platforms defined their own unique set of box-drawing characters. The hardware code page of

238-468: A replacement for Windows Console . The Windows Subsystem for Linux which was added to Windows by Microsoft in 2019, supports running Linux text-based apps on Windows, within Windows console , Windows Terminal , and other Windows-based terminals. In Unix-like operating systems, TUIs are often constructed using the terminal control library curses , or ncurses (a mostly compatible library), or

272-498: A single TUI, and so can be thought of as being like a window manager for text-mode and command-line interfaces. Tmux can also do this. The proprietary macOS text editor BBEdit includes a shell worksheet function that works as a full-screen shell window. The free Emacs text editor can run a shell inside of one of its buffers to provide similar functionality. There are several shell implementations in Emacs, but only ansi-term

306-411: A so-called tool text , thus serving as a user-configurable menu. Even the output of a previous command can be edited and used as a new command. This approach is radically different from both conventional dialogue-oriented console menus or command-line interfaces . Since it does not use graphical widgets , only plain text, but offers comparable functionality to a GUI with a tiling window manager , it

340-483: A text-mode console or terminal, but requires a large bit-mapped display, on which text is the primary target for mouse clicks. Analogous to a link in hypertext , a command has the format Module.Procedure parameters  ~ and is activated with a mouse middle-click. Text displayed anywhere on the screen can be edited, and if formatted with the required command syntax, can be middle-clicked and executed. Any text file containing suitably-formatted commands can be used as

374-533: Is more simple and appropriate to draw lines and rectangles directly with graphical APIs . However, they are still useful for command-line interfaces and plaintext comments within source code . Some recent embedded systems also use proprietary character sets, usually extensions to ISO 8859 character sets, which include box-drawing characters or other special symbols. Other types of box-drawing characters are block elements , shade characters, and terminal graphic characters; these can be used for filling regions of

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408-557: Is referred to as a Text User Interface or TUI. For a short introduction, see the 2nd paragraph on page four of the first published Report on the Oberon System . Oberon's UI influenced the design of the Acme text editor and email client for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system. Modern embedded systems are capable of displaying TUI on a monitor like personal computers. This functionality

442-432: Is suitable for running TUI programs. The other common shell modes, shell and eshell only emulate command lines and TUI programs will complain "Terminal is not fully functional" or display a garbled interface. The free Vim and Neovim text editors have terminal windows (simulating xterm ). The feature is intended for running jobs, parallel builds, or tests, but can also be used (with window splits and tab pages) as

476-776: Is usually implemented using specialized integrated circuits, modules, or using FPGA . Video circuits or modules are usually controlled using VT100 -compatible command set over UART , FPGA designs usually allow direct video memory access. Box-drawing character Box-drawing characters , also known as line-drawing characters , are a form of semigraphics widely used in text user interfaces to draw various geometric frames and boxes. These characters are characterized by being designed to be connected horizontally and/or vertically with adjacent characters, which requires proper alignment. Box-drawing characters therefore typically only work well with monospaced fonts . In graphical user interfaces , these characters are much less useful as it

510-521: The CPC , PCW and Spectrum families included a rich set of line-drawing characters as well: MouseText is a set of display characters for the Apple IIc , IIe , and IIGS that includes box-drawing characters. On many platforms, the character shape is determined programmatically from the character code. However, DOS line- and box-drawing characters are not ordered in any programmatic manner, so calculating

544-704: The Commodore PET and the Commodore 64 , included a set of text semigraphics with block elements and dithering patterns in the PETSCII character set. The Sinclair ZX80 , ZX81 , and ZX Spectrum included a set of text semigraphics with quadrant-based block elements. The ZX80 and ZX81 also included a set of text semigraphics with dithering patterns. The BBC Micro could utilize the Teletext 7-bit character set, which had 128 box-drawing characters, whose code points were shared with

578-521: The conio library ), Lotus 1-2-3 and many others. Some of these interfaces survived even during the Microsoft Windows 3.1x period in the early 1990s. For example, the Microsoft C 6.0 compiler, used to write true GUI programs under 16-bit Windows, still has its own TUI. Since its start, Microsoft Windows includes a console to display DOS software. Later versions added the Windows console as

612-549: The screen buffer was far faster and simpler to program, and less error-prone; see VGA-compatible text mode for details. This change in programming methods resulted in many DOS TUI programs. The Windows console environment is notorious for its emulation of certain EGA/VGA text mode features, particularly random access to the text buffer, even if the application runs in a window. On the other hand, programs running under Windows (both native and DOS applications) have much less control of

646-597: The above section, allowing arbitrary cursor movements and color changes. However, not all terminals follow this standard, and many non-compatible but functionally equivalent sequences exist. On IBM Personal Computers and compatibles , the Basic Input Output System ( BIOS ) and DOS system calls provide a way to write text on the screen, and the ANSI.SYS driver could process standard ANSI escape sequences. However, programmers soon learned that writing data directly to

680-640: The alternative S-Lang library. The advent of the curses library with Berkeley Unix created a portable and stable API for which to write TUIs. The ability to talk to various text terminal types using the same interfaces led to more widespread use of "visual" Unix programs, which occupied the entire terminal screen instead of using a simple line interface. This can be seen in text editors such as vi , mail clients such as pine or mutt , system management tools such as SMIT , SAM , FreeBSD 's Sysinstall and web browsers such as lynx . Some applications, such as w3m , and older versions of pine and vi use

714-403: The block. In version 13.0, Unicode was extended with another block containing many graphics characters, Symbols for Legacy Computing , which includes a few box-drawing characters and other symbols used by obsolete operating systems (mostly from the 1980s). Few fonts support these characters (one is Noto Sans Symbols 2 ), but the table of symbols is provided here: The image below is provided as

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748-414: The board ( Dr. Halo by Media Cybernetics ), offered support for the hardware. Graphic routines could be called from FORTRAN , PASCAL or IBM BASIC . This computer hardware article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Text-based user interface In computing , text-based user interfaces ( TUI ) (alternately terminal user interfaces , to reflect a dependence upon

782-621: The display and keyboard than Linux and DOS programs can have, because of aforementioned Windows console layer. Most often those programs used a blue background for the main screen, with white or yellow characters, although commonly they had also user color customization. They often used box-drawing characters in IBM's code page 437 . Later, the interface became deeply influenced by graphical user interfaces (GUI), adding pull-down menus , overlapping windows , dialog boxes and GUI widgets operated by mnemonics or keyboard shortcuts . Soon mouse input

816-404: The display using box-drawing characters such as ┌ and ╣. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator . From text application 's point of view, a text screen (and communications with it) can belong to one of three types (here ordered in order of decreasing accessibility): Under Linux and other Unix-like systems, a program easily accommodates to any of the three cases because

850-497: The left and right half blocks, as well as integral halves with other, usually alphabetic, characters (such as code page 850 ): Note: The non-double characters are the thin (light) characters (U+2500, U+2502), not the bold (heavy) characters (U+2501, U+2503). Some OEM DOS computers supported other character sets, for example the Hewlett-Packard HP 110  / HP Portable and HP 110 Plus  / HP Portable Plus , where in

884-450: The less-able termcap library, performing many of the functions associated with curses within the application. Custom TUI applications based on widgets can be easily developed using the dialog program (based on ncurses ), or the Whiptail program (based on S-Lang ). In addition, the rise in popularity of Linux brought many former DOS users to a Unix-like platform, which has fostered

918-665: The line-drawing characters listed above. The World System Teletext (WST) uses pixel-drawing characters for some graphics. A character cell is divided in 2×3 regions, and 2  = 64 code positions are allocated for all possible combinations of pixels. These characters were added to the Unicode standard in Version 13. Many microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s had their own proprietary character sets, which also included box-drawing characters. Many of these were added to Unicode as Symbols for Legacy Computing . Commodore machines, such as

952-496: The original IBM PC supplied the following box-drawing characters, in what DOS now calls code page 437 . This subset of the Unicode box-drawing characters is thus included in WGL4 and is far more popular and likely to be rendered correctly: The integral halves are also box drawing as they are used alongside 0xB3: Their number is further limited to 28 on those code pages that replace the 18 characters that combine single and double lines,

986-415: The properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction , before the advent of bitmapped displays and modern conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like modern GUIs, they can use the entire screen area and may accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure

1020-434: The regular alphanumeric and punctuation characters. Control characters were used to switch between regular text and box drawing. The BBC Master and later Acorn computers have the soft font by default defined with line drawing characters. The Amstrad CPC character set also has soft characters defined by default as block and line drawing characters. The CP/M Plus character set used on various Amstrad computers of

1054-476: The same interface (namely, standard streams ) controls the display and keyboard. See below for comparison to Windows. Many TUI programming libraries are available to help developers build TUI applications . American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard ANSI X3.64 defines a standard set of escape sequences that can be used to drive terminals to create TUIs (see ANSI escape code ). Escape sequences may be supported for all three cases mentioned in

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1088-607: The screen and portraying drop shadows . Unicode includes 128 such characters in the Box Drawing block. In many Unicode fonts, only the subset that is also available in the IBM PC character set (see below) will exist, due to it being defined as part of the WGL4 character set. The image below is provided as a quick reference for these symbols on systems that are unable to display them directly: The Block Elements Unicode block includes shading characters. 32 characters are included in

1122-499: The sequence Esc ( B switched back: On some terminals, these characters are not available at all, and the complexity of the escape sequences discouraged their use, so often only ASCII characters that approximate box-drawing characters are used, such as - ( hyphen-minus ), | ( vertical bar ), _   ( underscore ), =   ( equal sign ) and + ( plus sign ) in a kind of ASCII art fashion. Modern Unix terminal emulators use Unicode and thus have access to

1156-553: Was added – either at text resolution as a simple colored box or at graphical resolution thanks to the ability of the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) and Video Graphics Array (VGA) display adapters to redefine the text character shapes by software  – providing additional functions. Some notable programs of this kind were Microsoft Word , DOS Shell , WordPerfect , Norton Commander , Turbo Vision based Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C (the latter included

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